Red House Academy, Sunderland 2011
Jody, Tyler, Gemma and Bethany have shared the group's ideas in the following blog entries:
- we took pictures of things that might encourage or make people not want to walk to school.
- we have made posters to show problems and benefits of walking to school
- we have been on a walk.
- we have made charts
- we have designed questionnaires
- we have looked at the map of our area
We decided to work with the year 7's to help with childhood obesity for example; we are going to go for a walk on the ash path and up the complex in the summer, so we can spend a reasonable amount of time outside without people getting poorly and being cold.
Health and wellbeing in our local area:
Year 7's are good to work with because it can get them in a habit of walking to school and they can continue the process as they grow older, also they have just started school. Enrichment time is a good time to do sessions because we have our chance to do meetings. Enrichment time is 2:40 to 3:40.
by Jody Donkin.
- we took pictures of things to encourage people to clean the area.
- we went around the local estate and looked at reasons why people didn't want to walk to school. What we found was:
- dog mess litter cracked unsafe paving stones.
We have decided to have a meeting with the local council department to see if we can suggested some reasons to encourage young people to walk to school. it is important to walk to school for me because i like to communicate with my friends before i go.
by Tyler Whitfield.
- we designed the questionnaires
- we designed charts
- we made posters
- we took pictures of the bad thing and the good things about the area
- we went on a walk around the local area.
Councillors meeting - to be arranged
Why is it important - they try to be helpful and arrange the improvements to be carried out.
They may have funding.
by Gemma Bradley
We have chosen to do the campaign with year 7 because we would like to help the health and well being of young people in the area, plus we thought it would be good to do it with the younger people in the school to get into the habit of walking.
We are going to have a meeting with the council and these are the things we would like to talk about with them :-
- to improve the area walking paths, to get them fixed to its all even. litter, more bins. dog mess, more dog bins
by Bethany Meek
The Red House group's Campaign-in-a-Box facilitator added:
The student group from Red House Academy chosen to undertake the Campaign-in-a-Box project is a curriculum group following a 'Health and Social Care' qualification. This project supports the work that they do in the local community with the elderly residents of a nearby care home, and compliments other work that they do relating to health and well being. With this in mind the group have some timetabled opportunities to progress the project and can work both in the school with other year groups and in the local community with the older group that they are placed with regularly. It was difficult for this group to start a discussion about the campaign and its possibilities without prompting from staff members but the group was happy to follow the instructions in the workbook and determine what they would imagine a campaign to be. Once this was established we were able to talk about how a campaign might work in their school and looked at the possibility of targeting a particular year group. The girls thought it would be nice to work with the year 7's in school and to encourage more of them to incorporate walking into their everyday activity. They decided that a good way to measure success was to collate some background information first through a questionnaire, and then compare answers after their campaign.
11th February 2011
When I arrived the group had already distributed their questionnaires and had received many responses from the year 7 tutors in school. This session was then spent analyzing the information gathered and thinking about a route that could be improved around school. The group worked very hard on collating all of the information they had gathered and presenting the information, including as a graph to show the reasons that the year 7's liked to walk, and how many did so at the moment. This data can then be used to see if there is any improvement in these numbers after the campaign. During this session the group then undertook their street treasure hunt, walking for 15 minutes towards Red House from school and finding a circular route to follow on their return. The identified many features on the streets around school that they thought could be improved and took notice of the way that some features might put others off, including the younger and older members of public that they work with. Following the street treasure hunt the group were keen to provide a more positive walking experience for the year 7's as they thought seeing all of the negative aspects might limit their campaign before it even got started, then once they had a group who were keen to walk they could think about improvements in the long term. The girls decided that it would be nicer to start their campaign with some summer walks around a countryside site near school, making use of the times when the timetable is more flexible. The group can promote the health benefits of walking as part of their class work and can even offer wheelchair walks for their placement group once the weather has improved.